That's a really good point. Have any of the branches tried to address this? There's nothing stopping anybody from making a branch that does sane versioning & maintenance.
I'm not sure how you would address this with a branch, while keeping your sanity. If I understand the parent, he would like to see more frequent releases, especially more frequent releases of fixes to bugs seen in the released versions, but I think he would also want to keep quality of releases about the same.
That means, you probably just can't cut releases on a schedule and call it a day, you also have to decide which commits should be added to your inbetween releases, and which should wait. Sometimes, that's probably pretty easy, but other times, I would expect a lot of things to be mixed together, especially when code refactoring is needed to enable new features, the refactoring may (hopefully) fix existing bugs, but the new features are likely to be unstable for some time, and shouldn't really get into a release until they're done.
Managing that without upstream cooperation sounds like a nightmare, or at least like something that needs a team of smart people.
